Justin McCandless

This past weekend me, César, and Pria took a bus to Vilcabamba to go horseback riding. It was a four hour ride in the mountains nearby the town, and it ended up being way more fun than I expected. Our guide was a guy named Holger who runs a little horseback riding place out of Vilcabamba. César knew him before hand, and he was a really cool guy, so if you ever find yourself in Vilcabamba and you've already had your fill of eternal youth water and panela, check it out.

Ok, so I left off with my USA presentation on my first full day in Ecuador, Thursday the 7th of May. The next day I started work at Fundación Ecologica Arcoiris. I dressed up in a tie and all, and Fátima, a new friend from AIESEC came to get me at my house and take me there and make sure everything was ok with the job. The tie ended up being a bit too professional, everyone there was so laid back.

I'm back from Manta, so I'm going to write about that for now and catch up with my Catch Up post later. So, Manta. It was a trip that most of the AIESEC members in Ecuador were making, with the purpose of having a bunch of conferences and switching the national committee and stuff like that. So most of the work was for the Ecuadorians, while us interns would pretty much just hang out.

Here's my long post. Let me try and write a little about everything that has happened so far since I've been here, and then I'll be all caught up to keep the updates coming at a regular basis. I'll start with the trip over here. I began by departing from Las Vegas at 11pm PST on the 5th of May (not including my Ann Arbor to Chicago to Las Vegas travel which ended two days earlier), and after stops in Miami and San Jose, Costa Rica, I arrived in Quito about 13 hours later.

I have officially begun my internship in Loja, Ecuador, and so far it has been pretty awesome. This is still just a quick post, though, because free time with laptop connected to internet is short. In fact, I am currently writing this while offline, and I plan on ftping it to the server tomorrow while at work. This is also my plan for turkiball.com (sorry already deathly slow work internet). But not to make a completely useless post, here is a more or less chronological order list of some of the things I've done so far: Met a bunch of really cool people from UTPL, the university who I'm intercambio-ing with through AIESEC.

Well, it looks like I'll be heading to Loja, Ecuador, for an internship this summer. Which is pretty friggin' sweet. I should be able to scrounge up some internet somewhere so that I can continue to work on my websites. I especially want to write about my experiences and stuff on this here blog, so get ready for that. I should be leaving early May. In related news, turkiball.com is coming along nicely, while also consuming most of my html writing power /makingexcusesfornotupdatingblog.

So, a friend of mine at the University of Michigan invented this awesome new sport called Turkiball. It's similar to field hockey but using special bats and with a few different rules. Plus tons of awesome. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCCjxw5NCFI www.turkiball.com

As it appears at first glance, Left 4 Dead (pc) has launched without any LAN support. Which is terrible. However, for anybody who has wondered about this, there is a less obvious way to run a LAN game, even offline using only one Steam account. It's a just a little bit more difficult than most games make it, for whatever reason. So here is what you need to do to get this to work.

Supreme Commander 2 was announced last night and I am excited. Square Enix will be publishing, which is pretty crazy, and hopefully they'll give Gas Powered Games the support they need to crank out something awesome. I really can't imagine what this game is going to be like comparing Total Annihilation to Supreme Commander as scale, but it should be awesome. It just might be a long time until we actually see the game.

Ok I'm posting this because I may be able to help some of the many many Far Cry 2 customers who have not been able to play the game they forked over $50 for (like me). I was previously having the whole crash to desktop after the splash screen problem that has had gamers damning Ubisoft on forums all over the internet. This may be able to fix a few other problems as well, however.